A hedge-fund manager on the 28th floor who pretended to be dead when investors asked for their money reported to prison in January. A few weeks later, an investment adviser on the 17th floor was accused of running a Ponzi-like scheme. Thirteen floors up, a lawyer pleaded guilty this month to stealing millions of dollars from clients.

It was all happening at 40 Wall St., across from the New York Stock Exchange, behind golden capital letters proclaiming that this is THE TRUMP BUILDING. — Bloomberg

The Los Angeles Police Commission approved a new policy directing LAPD officers to treat homeless people with “compassion and empathy.”

The policy was meant to be a broad statement – a “philosophy more than it is the nuts and bolts,” [Cmdr Todd] Chamberlain recently told police commissioners. More specifics will come in future directives, he added.

But the new statement [unsurprisingly] was met with some skepticism from homeless advocates. — Los Angeles Times

Led by a still active multi-family housing market and sustained by solid levels of demand for new commercial and retail properties, the Architecture Billings Index has accelerated to its highest score in nearly a year. [...] May ABI score was 53.1, up sharply from the mark of 50.6 in the previous month. This score reflects an increase in design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 60.1, up from a reading of 56.9 the previous month. — AIA

On May 9, 10,000 Uber drivers effectively lost their jobs. So they did what anyone in 2016 does, they turned to Facebook to mobilize—and soon enough the passengers followed. [...]

The new system works like this: A prospective rider posts their pickup location within the group and within minutes several drivers usually comment with their contact information and screenshot of their Uber and/or Lyft profile. From there, the passenger and chosen driver negotiate a trip price privately. — vocativ.com

In May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) catapulted Ada Colau into power as the city’s first female mayor. Ten months earlier, the group didn’t even exist.

With no money and little experience, just how did they wrest the city from the entrenched political caste that had been running it for the past 40 years? Not surprisingly, Barcelona en Comú has since been inundated with requests for an answer... — the Guardian

City attorney Mike Feuer has filed criminal charges against Carol Jean Alsman, a local property owner, for allegedly forcing out tenants in rent-controlled units and then listing the units for rent on Airbnb. [...]

[Feuer’s] office has lodged civil complaints against three other Los Angeles property owners for allegedly using their buildings as illegal hotels [...]

“In a city with a profound shortage of affordable housing, unlawfully converting rental units to operate hotels has got to stop” — qz.com

Brutalism will never happen again. Our stock of Brutalism is limited, and sadly under constant attack. The demolition and ‘refurbishment’ of great buildings by Rudolph, I M Pei, Denys Lasdun and other giants of the movement should be taken as seriously as would the loss of buildings by Donato Bramante, Christopher Wren or Frank Lloyd Wright. Brutalism deserves far better than the wrecker’s ball: it was the pinnacle of world architecture through all of history. — Aeon

Copycat attacks sprang up around the world: trains going haywire in Japan; smart thermostats freezing pipes in Minneapolis; Chinese hackers noodling around a water utility in San Francisco. Americans suddenly realized that, although they had spent plenty of time anguishing about how to protect the country’s physical borders, with every device they bought, they had been letting more and more invaders into their cities, their homes, and their lives. — New York Magazine

Sweden, once one of the most welcoming countries for refugees, on Tuesday introduced tough new restrictions on asylum seekers, including rules that would limit the number of people granted permanent residency and make it more difficult for parents to reunite with their children.

The government said the legislation... was necessary to prevent the country from becoming overstretched by the surge of migration to Europe that began last year. — the New York Times

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles. — wsj.com

River LA is less interested in giving a clear picture of what Gehry’s plan eventually may include than in tamping down charges that it has been born of secrecy — and worries that it may operate as a Trojan horse, a kind of high-design architectural cover, for rampant real-estate speculation [...]

A central goal of this master plan... will be to strike an effective balance between maintaining flood-control measures while opening up the river to new kinds of public access.

The museum, which will open on Tennozu Isle in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district will not only be a place for these models to be displayed, but also act as an effort to preserve them.

The space will be lined with over 100 shelves to display their permanent collection, in addition to special exhibits. Each model in the museum will be accompanied by a QR code which can be scanned using a smartphone to access more information about the structure, including photos of the completed work. — popupcity.net

Elevators are [the] transportation breakthrough that made steel frame construction genuinely useful... tall apartment buildings make it possible for there to be plenty of housing for everyone even where land is scarce.

If elevators were more widely used, they could unleash not just a boom of new construction in America's most expensive areas but an important secondary boom of higher wages for workers at all skill levels. — vox.com

world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who recently chaired a 12-hour debate on "what is Europe?", argues the EU has been a good thing for his country and for the UK, where he began his architecture studies in the 1960s.

Sitting in his Rotterdam office, he told me the Brexit camp was full of people who "fundamentally want to change England back to the way it was before" and lamented the way, as he sees it, the EU has been used as a scapegoat. — bbc.com